Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Mars: the next frontier

Any errors are mine. Writing level is aimed at "interested amateur", not expert.

UPDATE: Lubos Motl editorialises on this. See comments there and on Real Climate for discussion.Interesting perspective. I think I'll return to this soon, arguing with opinionated string theorists is sophomoric but fun.

Hey, some of my best friends are string theorists, and most of them are very nice people too. Arguing with them is fun too.

Sadly the breakthrough punditry of May has been superceded by the sage wisdom of October. The "other group" had their paper come out and did a NASA SSU on tuesday, I was supposed to be the "external pundit" but had to recuse myself because of conflict of interest. see here for latest

"Sir, I think your RealClimate article is nonsense, because it conflicts with my views on the warming of Earth's climate. I found an article written by a person with a PhD, and whilst I don't understand the many large words that are used, I wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion, and have therefore posted the link in your blog comments as an effective refutation of your piece, which also had many words I didn't quite follow, but whose conclusion did not sit well with me at all."

An amusing excerpt from the "article" (which we call a "blog entry" in *my* part of town):

What's equally striking is that the team of ten "RealClimate" scientists who claim that they understand the climate is not able to write anything about the issue of the Martian global warming. Instead, they invite a "guest blogger" who is himself a binary star specialist i.e. who has professionally nothing to do with the climate models whatsoever.

Well, fair enough, except the writer is a *string theorist*, which, to my knowledge, is not a field that heavily influences climatography.

This Lubos Motl is quite the tosser, however. He sent a nasty letter to one of the guys over at Planet Gnome because he had the nerve to criticise Motl's lack of civility in another debate (not one of my strong suits either, sadly). I guess if I were a string theorist, I'd be angry too.

Oh dear. I left a couple of comments on Lubos's blog and put in a pointer at Real Climate. The kindest thing I can say is that Lubos must not have actually read any of the papers, he seems to base his argument on a misreading of an OSU press release.I know they have Nature at the Harvard library...

I'll get back to this when I have more time...

Just remember: "never trust a string theorist when there is real data available on the subject"

Still, I think that you know that what you write is not true. You know that the paper does not say that the recent warming trends on Mars are not global in character - on the contrary, the authors think that it is.

And you must know that I've read the paper because you must have seen comments that I could not have written without knowing the content of the paper.

Believe me that it is trivial to get to any article in Nature if you have a Harvard ID.